We spent the night in her apartment. She wasn’t there; she was in hospice. We were surrounded by all of the things she had accumulated over her 90 years. There was her collection of porcelain angels; family photos, and an assortment of knickknacks. She had her books: mostly Bible commentaries and hymnals, but also some church history and historical fiction, mostly about the American Revolution and Civil War. It was a bit morbid, but we knew that in a short time we would have to figure out what to do with all of this stuff because she wouldn’t be needing it.
As we decide what to keep and what to toss, stuff of memories will be lost. My mother loved getting greeting cards. She ranked birthdays and Christmases by how many cards she got. She would take them out periodically to read the handwritten notes and to be reminded of friends and relations. But those cards, so precious and full of memories to her, don’t mean anything to us, except that they were hers. We wouldn’t even know anything about the people who sent most of the cards.
If people wish to save documents, like greeting cards, they will preserve them in an archive. Many people are familiar with the saying, “History is written by victors.” But in reality, history is written by those who keep the archives. If there is no record, there is no history. Archives store things which will be of value in the future, not monetarily, bit historically. An archive is there to answer future questions about the past. So our society’s history, waiting to be written, is kept in archives, in local history rooms and in museums. As an undergraduate I wrote for the university’s student newspapers. One of the first articles I wrote was on the university’s archives. Included in the collection were Board of Trustees minutes, presidential papers, the kinds of things you would expect. But there were also the unexpected: theater posters, banquet menus and building plans. But not everything is worth storing in an archive or museum.
A museum or archive has limited space and a limited budget. As a result, archivists have protocols which determine what should be included in their collections and what they should reject. If it is a university archive, they might keep a professor’s lecture notes, but not the notes of that professor’s students. A student’s notes may contain memories worth preserving, it is not the mission of that archive to preserve them. If no other depository can be found, those memories will be lost. And those memories which can’t be preserved can’t become part of history.
Not only do we preserve objects because of their future use as a memory aid, we also erect monuments and set aside places where important things happened. The beaches of Normandy are preserved to remember D-Day. We create registries of historic places and UNESCO World Heritage sites. Monuments are public stuff which represent things we value now and wish to transmit that same value to the future. An archivist does not know what questions a researcher might want to answer. Documents are collected on their potential to be useful at some time in the future. The archivist cannot know if that professor’s lecture notes will ever be looked at, but, given the archive’s mission, if someone is interested in that professor or how a particular subject was taught at a particular point in time, that archive would be the place to look.
A monument, on the other hand, says to the future, we value this and we want you to think about it in this way, too. The Treptow Monument in Berlin wants us to think of the Soviet Union as benevolently saving Germany from fascism. While this message no longer resonates, the hope of those who erected it was that it would inspire friendship between the Soviet Union and East Germany into the future
Just because a monument is a way the past suggests we think in the present, does not mean those in the present need to accept that message. This is part of the controversy over monuments commemorating the Civil War Era. The call to remove statues of Abraham Lincoln did not arise because people suddenly decided Lincoln should be vilified or that he shouldn’t be remember. The issue was the way in which he should be remembered. Lincoln was called “The Great Emancipator” and was frequently portrayed in statues with formerly enslaved people kneeling at his feet. These monuments fit a trope known as the “White Savior.” They portray Lincoln as the active party in emancipation and the formerly enslaved as merely passive. In fact, thousands of free blacks and former slaves fought in the Union Army. They helped bring about their own liberation. It, therefore, makes sense that the present doesn’t think that such an image should be sent into the future.
Relics are another way in which stuff sparks memories. They bring into contact with important people or events. Some religious practices place great importance on a person’s remains, especially that of someone deemed holy. Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims were on their way to venerate the relics of St. Thomas of Beckett. Buddhists visit Siddhartha Gautama’s burial site. Objects owned or worn by famous people form the collections of many museums. If you go to Charles Dickens’s home, you can see one of his many inkwells. It looks like most other inkwells, but because it was used by a great man, we preserve it. What would the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame be if rock musicians didn’t wear unique clothing?
Archive, Monument or Relic? What is the stuff in my mother’s apartment? While my mother has led an interesting life, I can’t see saving her stuff for future historians. I’m not sure what would be learned from the stuff she had in the last years of her life. The best evidence of her life is the family chain letter. She has been corresponding with the members of her family for more than 60 years. But I’m not even sure where those letters are.
I don’t think they are monuments. She didn’t collect her porcelain angels because they would say to the future, “Porcelain angels are important;” she collected them because she liked them in the present. She didn’t expect us to share her enthusiasm . That leaves relics.
Before we left, my sister, who was mom’s caregiver, said we should take whatever we wanted from the apartment. I looked around and realized that there wasn’t anything there that connected me to my mom. They were the stuff of her memories, not the stuff of my memories of her. I didn’t need a relic. And I already stuff to trigger my memories: photos and gifts, letters and cards. So I left the apartment empty handed.